10 Oct
2011
10 Oct
'11
7:03 a.m.
On 9 October 2011 23:10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 10/09/2011 02:59 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
I think it had its place at one time, but it's not really got one any more.
CPU, RAM and disk are all very, very cheap now. Local processing and
rendering cost effectively nothing and the network stuff is just in
the way - for the deployment of 99% of Unix boxes now (Linux and Mac
PCs, iOS and Android phones and slates, a lot of routers and a
relatively small number of servers), a networkable GUI is not merely
irrelevant, it's baggage.
What is expensive is *state* - maintaining configuration files,
patching, updating and so on. Currently the trendy kids are playing
with whole-system virtualisation for this. It's laughably inefficient
but it costs lots for all the licences - which of course the
proprietary-S/W vendors *love*. I expect it will go away in time and
we'll end up with something like Solaris Zones or FreeBSD jails in the
end, or some other OS-level virtualisation solution. Or perhaps even a
return to network-booting workstations, but with lots of local caching
this time.
X was about sharing CPU and rendering power over the network, and that
is 1980s thinking. There is just no need for it any more. It's a waste
of bandwidth.
Even Ubuntu is seriously looking into getting rid of X.11 and moving
to Wayland, with networking relegated to a legacy-compatibility
submodule.
I have been installing, maintaining and using Unix machines since 1988
- probably a newbie around here - and I have never *once* used X over
a network. For remote-control, it's rdesktop/mstsc for Windows
machines and something involving VNC for everything else.
All IMHO, natch...
--
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But here we are, in 2011, stuck with X11 on many systems. Better imaging
is one thing Steve Jobs got right, in NEXTSTEP and OS X.
?...which is something that, in my opinion, makes the whole world work
better. ?I feel that the OS X graphics system, while capable of beautiful
rendering, is a huge step backward in functionality. ?I mean, c'mon, a
non-networked windowing system, post-2000? ?What is this, Windows? ?WTF?! ?I
will stick with X11!